BOOKS AND CURRENT LITERATURE 



287 



its auiiouncement a veritable storm of derision although this is not 

 and never was an essential of the Bureau's position. It is simply an 

 attempt to grasp one of the many "other factors" upon which fertility 

 may depend. The reviewer holds no brief for the Bureau's theories 

 in detail, but it seems that for the essence of the theory no one need 

 argue longer. To mention only a few of many workers, the results 

 of Russell and BoUey on the living constituents of the soil; of Dach- 

 nowski, Schreiner, Shorey and others on the organic but non-living 

 constituents; of !Mitscherlich and Livingston on the physical relations 

 of plant, soil and soil water, make it quite impossible that we should 

 continue to regard plant food content as the whole or even the larger 

 part of soil fertility. 



Having had — let us hope — enough of what the reviewer thinks, let 

 us return to what Dr. Cameron thinks. The book before us^ is two 

 things in one. First, it is the latest and unquestionably the best pre- 

 sentation of the position of the author and his associates in the con- 

 troversy above outlined. Second, it is a repeated attempt to apply 

 the findings of physical chemistry to the phenomena of the soil, this 

 point of view having been originally proposed by Dr. Cameron in 1900^ 

 and gradually developed since that time by him and his various asso- 

 ciates. The book begins with three introductory chapters devoted to 

 the general nature of the soil and the usual systems of soil management 

 and examination, in which is developed the conclusion, now almost uni- 

 versally accepted, that the chemical determination of the plant-food 

 elements of a soil very seldom throws any light on its fertility. There 

 follow two contrasted chapters in which are outlined the older static 

 theory of fertility and fertilizers and the newer dynamic theory of the 

 Bureau of Soils, which theory regards soil conditions as incessantly 

 changing and the supply of plant food materials as naturally renewable 

 and continually renewed. There is an outline of the means by which 

 this renewal is effected, including the movement of the soil solution, the 

 phenomena of normal soil erosion and translocation by wind and water 

 and the matter of the continual renewal of the soil cover in general by 

 rock weathering and decay. Next come four chapters devoted primar- 

 ily to the application of the laws and concepts of physical chemistry to 

 some of the soil phenomena. Th'ere is a suggestive, though very brief, 

 s\mamary of the properties and behavior of the film water, an outline 



' Cameron, Frank K., The Soil Solution. 136 pp. Easton, Pa. : The Chemical 

 Publishing Company. 1911. ($1.25). 



- Field Operation, Bureau of Soils, 1899, p. 149. 



